


A Year Of Traveling

by SoundandColor



Category: Gattaca
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:15:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoundandColor/pseuds/SoundandColor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eugene doesn’t consider himself the sentimental sort, but he makes sure he's there when Vincent’s shuttle launches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Year Of Traveling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KBTS (WithoutBringingMeDreams)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WithoutBringingMeDreams/gifts).



Eugene doesn’t consider himself the sentimental sort, but he makes sure he’s there when Vincent’s shuttle launches.

It sounds like a bomb going off when you’re this close. His ears are ringing, his mouth is filled with dust and his eyes are gritty but Jerome never shuts them. (There’s a startling moment when he wonders if it’s safe to even think of himself as that name again before deciding not to worry about it. The day they find a way into a man’s thoughts is the day they’ll all be well and truly fucked anyway).

He gazes up until Vincent’s tin can looks like a speck against the sky, until he can’t see the shuttle anymore, until anyone passing by would think him daft for staring up into an empty sky. He finally looks down but he doesn’t move to leave Gattaca’s car park. He even has a crazy idea that he can feel the exact moment Vincent opens his gift. It’s a flutter in the back of his throat. It's a sharp pinch where there used to be a clutch of hair the same color as a man who is currently hurtling forward through the atmosphere and out into a darkness blacker than anything he’ll ever experience in this life.

This is when Jerome decides it’s time to get out of here.

He’s never needed a drink more in his life.

-  
When he gets back home (two or three shots having eased his mind), Jerome almost goes through with it right then. He pulls his medal from the drawer, straightens his suit and rolls toward the incinerator with a purpose he’s rarely felt up until this moment. He’s ready for this ( _has_ been for a long time) but something feels… wrong. Something’s holding him back and he reluctantly decides to hold off for the moment.

Jerome puts his medal on the door handle and thinks of it as a placeholder.

He’ll be back soon.

-

Vincent left him with more than enough money in the bank to survive in his absence, but Jerome has never been the budgeting type. He drinks every penny of it in expensive champagne, wears it on his back as new suits tailored to his exact specifications, gives it to beautiful girls and boys who appear at his side door with empty eyes and half-smiles like daggers. He runs through money at a clip that should be worrisome (even to a person unaccustomed to thinking of such things) but he's never let practicality hold him back. Four months in, he realizes the phone isn’t ringing because it’s been shut off and, after opening the piles of letters on the floor just inside of his front door, it seems the electricity and water won't be far behind.

He picks up the phone, remembers it’s off and places it back into the cradle. Who was he going to call anyway? Vincent shuts his eyes as tightly as he can. He holds them until he can see colors like a prism behind his lids, until they burn. Then he opens them and takes a breath as he wheels to his room to grab a jacket. There’s no point in thinking of what’s about to happen. He can’t stop it.  
Instead of losing sleep, he decides he’ll live it up while Cavendish thinks his credit is still good.

-

It takes the older woman longer than it should to realize that _the check’s in the mail_ is as bald faced a lie as Jerome’s ever told and when she does, he takes to drinking cheap bottles of whiskey alone in his flat. He knows it’s a sorry sight but now that’s he’s broke, there’s no one to keep appearances up for.

He’s sitting in the center of his silent living room when the electricity goes out one afternoon three days later and it doesn't take him long to realize that he doesn’t really miss it.

Jerome just takes a breath and pours himself another glass of scotch.

-

Jerome’s lids are heavy when he opens them to find her standing over him. He narrows his eyes, searches his brain, but doesn’t come up with a name. Her presence doesn’t worry him though, he’s too drunk to heed such biological imperatives at the moment. Besides, her face is familiar. He doesn’t think it would be possible for anyone to forget it.

She’s beautiful – gorgeous really – in the truest sense of the word. She’s all dewy blondness, with a pouty mouth and a haughty aloofness only someone like the two of them – people born knowing they deserved everything they might ever desire – could capture. He remembers staring down at that face in the driver’s seat just beneath his window. He remembers kissing those lips because she couldn’t say no. He remembers those eyes watching as a plunger was sunk into his vein and the name _Morrow, Jerome_ popped up on the tester’s screen with a soothing beep.

“Irene.”

She folds her arms across her chest and ignores the unasked question in her name as she elegantly shrugs out of her coat and takes in the fast food wrappers, dirty socks, scattered cigarette butts and empty glasses around them expressionlessly.

“It looks like you’ve been keeping yourself busy.”

He raises his eyebrows at her oblique reprimand; smiles slyly but doesn’t respond. He waits. He waits for his gaze to make her shrink back into herself ever so slightly, to make her raise her chin in faux certainty. He waits until she turns to look out the window as a refuge from his unblinking stare before going on, triumphant.

“I didn’t really have a choice, did I? We both know I can’t just go out whenever I please.”

Her eyes get hard at his casual mention of their situation but she doesn’t respond and he feels himself getting annoyed.

“How did you get in here anyway?” He hates ask that; now she knows she has something he wants. It gives her power he doesn’t want her to have.  
Irene reaches into the pocket of her white linen pants without looking away from the window and lets a single key on a short chain dangle from her left hand. Jerome recognizes it and, suddenly, he’s so angry he can barely breathe.

“He asked me to check in on you every now and then.”

There’s no need to say who _he_ is, they both already know.

Jerome curves his mouth into something he hopes looks like a relaxed grin but it feels more like a sneer. “And six months later you finally show your face.”

She still doesn’t turn to look at him. He's rolling towards her before he can calculate how much ground his show of anger is ceding to her. He reaches up to try and jerk the key from her hand when she raises her arm out of his reach. They both freeze and the air between them becomes tense before she drops the key into his lap.

When he meets her gaze, Irene isn’t gloating and she isn’t wearing a smug smile at getting the better of him. She looks startled. Startled and upset and like she’d rather be anywhere other than here and (just like that) all his concern over power dynamics and all of his anger drain away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t…” She quiets, licks her lips and he rolls back to give her space.

“Why are you here?”

She shakes her head and looks at him like he should know, says, “Because he asked me to.” She maneuvers from her position between him and the wall toward the spiral staircase in the center of the floor. She’s climbed halfway up when she stops and looks down at him. “I’ll come to the back door tomorrow…” if you want me to. She doesn’t say it but he knows it none the less. With that, she turns away again and all he can hear is the soft echo of the door closing behind her.

-

He doesn’t answer the door the first four times he hears a timid knock against it but by the third week he’s desperate and lonely enough to toss his pride aside.

She starts visiting every day after that, drops off things like lasagna and freshly laundered sheets and toilet paper. They talk about things like the weather while holding mugs of tepid coffee for lack of anything better to with their hands. Their conversations never venture further than the polite topics drilled into their heads from birth by the kind of parents people like the two of them have. They side-step issues like the fact that (without heat) it’s so cold inside of his home they can see their own breath or (barring an explosion) that Vincent will be coming back soon.

She just brings him more blankets and more lasagna and more toilet paper and they keep their mouths shut.

-

She talks him into going to a utero bar one night with a bitten off grin and a light in her eyes that captures his attention. He’s never been to one. He's heard things, of course, (stuff about cheap beer and even cheaper women) so it doesn’t take much persuasion. They dress down and take a cab to a little hole in the wall with more people inside than can be legal.

He won’t get out on the dance floor (not even after he says he will if she buys him some of the special house brew) and she finally leaves him alone in a dim corner. He keeps his eyes on her though, watches her accepting drink after drink as she moves against men who have grizzled faces and dirt under their nails. Men who’ve never touched a woman like her and will later tell their friends that they did more than dance.  
That night, for the first time in Jerome’s life, he’s the one carrying someone out of the bar after last call.

He has the cabbie help him get her inside of the house and only considers it a moment before he nicks fifty dollars from Irene’s purse to pay the fair and the man’s tip. He waits until he hears their driver pulling away before he looks back at her.

“Only my room’s on this floor. You can stay in his upstairs.” He tries to think of something else to say and ends up settling on. “Goodnight,

Irene.”

She still doesn’t move so he turns around and rolls toward his bedroom. He tugs off his pants and shirt when he gets inside, exhausted. He starts to hoist himself into bed when he looks up, notices the door is open and that Irene standing there watching him. He doesn’t react at first, just stares at her swaying drunkenly from side to side with wide eyes. Then he thinks of what she’s seeing. Of his withered legs and bird thin chest, and he’s no longer curious, he’s embarrassed and angry. Mad that she’s here suddenly, that he gave her the permission to invade his life.

He opens his mouth to say something cutting, something that will make sure she never walks into his room without knocking again, when she reaches down, starts to undo her jeans and he’s struck dumb. He silently watches as she pulls off her shirt and toes off her trainers to reveal a soft gold pair of panties and a bra.

He doesn’t turn his head as she moves toward him, just watches from the corner of his eye as she climbs up into his bed and under the covers.  
Suddenly, he wants to touch her the way he knows Vincent must have. Jerome wants to know the exact paths his hands took on her body and follow them religiously. He wants to put his mouth on her collarbone and the back of her knee. He wants Vincent to help him. He wants the other man to pull her knees apart for him, to lay against his back, to gasp into the sweaty curve of Jerome’s neck, to push both he and Irene into the mattress.

He would be lying if he said he’d never thought of Vincent in that way before but the turn his fantasy has taken surprises him. The three of them together… He doesn’t know why he never thought of it before. Then again, he does. Irene was simply a complication before, an obstacle between him and the only friend he had.

She’s something else now. Something more.

“I didn’t want to come and see you.”

She says it quietly and even though he knew she was beside him, the sound of her voice startles him. He feels light headed, like he’s 12 years old and just got caught mid-orgasm, aroused and ashamed of it at the same time.

"It took six months for me to work up the courage.”

Jerome swallows thickly and they slip back into silence before she speaks again.

“Does it ever bother you?”

“What?” He asks, his voice is scratchy and rough to his own ears and he knows she hears it. He doesn’t know if he wants her to acknowledge it or not when she decides for the both of them and ignores it.

“That he’s better than us? That he shouldn’t be but he is anyway?” She whispers the questions so low he can barely hear her and, for a wild moment, he considers pretending like he didn’t. But it’s dark outside, it’s dark and it’s just them so he does something unexpected and tells the truth, says, “Yes.”

-

That night, he dreams of the three of them on a sun soaked beach.

Irene’s in a cobalt blue one piece with pin waves in her hair. Vincent looks the way he did when they first met, before they polished him and dyed his hair and broke his legs. He dreams of himself as well, six feet tall again with no wheelchair in sight.

He feels warm and when he slowly comes up into consciousness, he realizes why. The electricity is back on but he’s in bed alone. He sits up carefully, pulls his chair over to the bed and lifts himself into it. He rolls out of the room and sees Irene standing in the middle of the room, completely dressed with her purse on her arm.

“What are you—“

“He thinks everyone’s like him,” she cuts in apropos of nothing, not even looking up. “He thinks everyone’s strong in the same way he is but we’re not.” She raises her gaze and moves toward him before stopping to stare into his eyes like she’s trying to tell him something but he doesn’t understand. Then she drops his medal in his lap and he feels as winded as he used to after a race. He doesn’t know how, but she knows.  
“But we’re strong in a different way.”

He can hear himself exhale at her words but he doesn’t say anything when she walks toward the back door. He could do something this time. He could stop her, tell her that over their time together, she’s become a friend, He could ask her to save him but she already leaving and it’s too late anyway.

This could never end any other way. Not really.

She’s standing in the threshold between his home and his backyard and barely looks back over her shoulder. “Goodbye” – he can hear an almost inaudible hesitation – “Jerome.”

He wants to call to her, to tell her he’ll miss her, that he’ll miss them both, but he stays quiet. He watches the smooth line of her back as she walks away for the second and the last time.

-

Just to be clear: Jerome doesn’t regret anything and he’s not angry about how this has ended up either, but he does wish he had done some things differently.

He wishes he had asked Vincent what drove him, what pushed him to such single-minded purpose. It was more than being a utero. He knows because Jerome has seen others like him, standing on the side of the road, begging for change at stoplights; dusting the furniture and washing the dishes at his parents’ ivy walled country estate. The Vincent he knows has to be more than a simple quirk of birth.

He wishes he could ask Irene what finally led her to him, why she’d help him. He briefly considers writing a letter but that’s not his style and he doesn’t want them to remember him as anything other than who he is. When Jerome finally rolls toward the incinerator and pulls himself inside of it, he’s traveled this road so many times in his mind that the motions are almost muscle memory.

Vincent’s coming home soon and Jerome imagines him inside of something similar. He sees him slamming into the atmosphere, grinding his teeth against the pressure, white knuckling his re entry. He wonders how he’ll take it when Irene breaks the news. He’ll be sad, Jerome knows that, but he also knows there will be a small kernel of relief inside of the other man. He’ll never have to worry about being exposed again. That’s one of Jerome’s favorite parts of Vincent, that little bit of darkness a person like him needs in order to succeed in a world like this.

He hopes that Irene will cry at his funeral, that she’ll think of him while walking home from work, while reading a book, at strange moments during odd times of the day. He wonders if she'll ever wish she had done something differently. Something that would have made him change his mind, if she’ll ever tell Vincent everything that went on between them and he knows (despite the final ego boost the angst that would surely follow such a confession would bring him) that she won’t.

That the two of them will live happily ever after without him and that’s probably for the best.

There was never enough room in this world for the three of them anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you like this KingdombytheSea! I was sort of at a loss what to do when you gave me so much free reign but then this came to me and I had a lot of fun writing it. Thanks to St_Aurafina for the beta and I hope everyone enjoyed it!


End file.
